Ten years in, Jenn Lee is still sharpening her teeth. Her SS26 anniversary show at Village Underground wasn’t some tired retrospective, a greatest-hits moment designed to reassure investors. It was darker, hungrier, and more defiant than that – an ode to sensuality as armour, tradition as weapon, elegance as something vampiric.
Lee has always dealt in contradiction. Described as the “rebel star of sustainable fashion,” she pulls threads from punk, fetish and Eastern heritage, knotting them into garments that feel alive, sometimes dangerous. For this milestone collection she dug into Dream of the Red Chamber, the 18th-century Chinese novel about beauty, decadence and collapse, and pulled it through the grinder of London’s subcultural nightlife.
The show opened with dancer Liu I-Ling, her movements both fragile and raw, setting a mood closer to performance art than catwalk. Then came the clothes: pleated fan dresses stiff with poise, seventies leather restructured into broad-shouldered vampiric armour, qipaos re-engineered by a master artisan with starch-set forms and hand-knotted buttons. These were not museum relics, but living artefacts – precise, slow craft recast for an audience raised on speed.
There was theatre everywhere. Signature BDSM products, genuine Italian leather and hardware. Acupuncture needles glinted against bare skin, jewellery as ornament and wound. Models carried themselves like aristocrats one moment, street wanderers the next. Hair slicked then unravelled, lips cracked with red and black pigment. The tension between refinement and ruin never let go.
The soundtrack – opera collapsing into Mexican folk, post-punk twisting around Eastern instruments – refused cohesion. It was a fractured landscape, a sonic collage that mirrored the clothes: history and futurism stitched without apology.
This wasn’t just fashion but ritual, a reminder that clothing can be language, protest, seduction all at once. Jenn Lee’s decade was marked not by nostalgia, but by an insistence on moving forward. Her phygital showroom, built with Taiwanese platform Portal:M, turned the anniversary into an immersive VR temple – part gothic cavern, part Eastern shrine with a focus on the zipper motif as a metaphor for protection, boundaries, emotional tension. If the runway was blood and silk, the digital space was the afterlife, a place where her universe could be inhabited.
Lee’s SS26 show made one thing clear: survival in fashion isn’t about softening edges or smoothing chaos. It’s about leaning into the fracture, the eroticism, the contradictions that make clothes worth remembering. Ten years on, Jenn Lee is not a retrospective act. She is a warning: elegance is only interesting when it draws blood.